Soane Tonga'uiha plots Heineken Cup win for Northampton Saints

On the posters featuring the shortlist for the European Player of the Year
that have been hastily stuck up around Northampton Saints’ training ground
this week, some colourful comments have been added beneath the name of Soane
Tonga’uiha.

Doing it for the team: Tonga'uiha would prefer team victory in the Heineken Cup against Leinster to personal recognition as player of the year Photo: ACTION IMAGES

Gavin Mairs

5:17PM BST 20 May 2011

Tonga’uiha was unaware he had been nominated as one of five candidates for the award until he saw the posters, on which his team-mates have jokingly questioned whether the Tongan would make a worthy winner.

“I’ve had a lot of ribbing about it,” said Tonga’uiha, who surprisingly did not make the shortlist for the Premiership player of the season, which was won by his team-mate, Tom Wood.

“There are posters around the training ground put up by the lads, with the list of names nominated for the awards, including mine. Then underneath there’s stuff written that I can’t repeat about ‘how the hell is he in there?’” If his team-mates’ humorous reaction to his nomination is indicative of the band of brothers’ spirit in the Franklins’ Gardens dressing room, there are, of course, any number of reasons why Tonga’uiha should win the award.

He is not only a cult figure at Northampton, the club he joined in 2006 from Bedford, but is now arguably the most influential prop on the European stage, his powerful scrummaging and fearsome ball-carrying making for a potent combination. It is bewildering that you have to go back to the 2007 World Cup for his last cap for Tonga.

Yet Tonga’uiha’s indifference to his nomination is understandable. He says it will count for nothing unless his side, still smarting from their Aviva Premiership semi-final defeat by Leicester last weekend, beat Leinster in the Heineken Cup final at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday.

The 29 year-old admits that if his side are to have a chance of landing their second European crown since their triumph over Munster in 2000, they must stop three other rival candidates on the player of the year shortlist: Leinster’s back-row forwards Jamie Heaslip and Sean O’Brien, and full-back Isa Nacewa.

Northampton have been reviewing Leinster’s semi-final victory over Leicester at the Aviva Stadium in order to formulate a strategy to stop the Irish province repeating their 2009 European triumph. Tonga’uiha, gives nothing away when he suggests the key is neutralising the threat of Leinster’s main ball-carrying threats such as Heaslip and O’Brien to prevent Joe Schmidt’s side generating the front-foot ball that Nacewa loves to exploit with his jinking surges.

“They’re all great players, great ball carriers, in the loose,” said Tonga’uiha, who moved from Tonga to Auckland with his family at the age of eight. “For us to stop them, we’re going to have to stop them at source and we see the set-piece as the best way of doing that, to try to stop them getting into their game. Once they start getting forward momentum they do get into a pattern where they seem impossible to stop, so we’ve got to stop them at source and not allow them to play.

“What we’re going to try to do is disrupt them in the set-piece and not give them as much free ball as they have had in the past. In doing that, hopefully that will stop their main players from playing and at the same time when we get the ball, hopefully we can show what we can do. We’re an attacking team and we’ve just got to get our hands on the ball and play a bit more than we did last week.”

Disrupting Leinster’s front five is a task more formidable than it might have been in seasons past, however. The influence of Ireland’s scrummaging coach, Greg Feek, the former Crusaders and New Zealand prop, has given the Dublin side a definitive edge at the set piece.

If the likes of Heaslip, O’Brien and Nacewa have lorded the media attention, Leinster’s front row of Cian Healey, Richardt Strauss and former Harlequins prop Mike Ross, have emerged as a formidable, if unheralded unit.

“We’ll definitely be focused on getting on top of them set-piece wise, especially in the scrums, but, as I said, it’s not going to take 40, 50, or 60 minutes as it has been throughout the group stages, quarters and semis,” he added.

“I think Leinster are a team that’s going to stick with us pretty much the whole way and if we do get on top of them, it won’t be until the last five or 10 minutes.” Ironically, Tonga’uiha, who is joined in the Saints front row today by England hooker Dylan Hartley and Springbok prop Brian Mujati, also expects Leinster to adopt a similar strategy.

The most significant criticism of Tonga’uiha is that if you tie him up in the scrum, his siege-busting breaks in the loose dry up.

“I’d like to get distracted but the scrum is our primary job,” he added. “We have to get on top of that and if our scrum and line-outs are going well, we sort of find a bit of energy coming from somewhere, we get out there and enjoy running with the ball. If we don’t get on top with our set-piece, we lose that bit of energy and you don’t get out in the loose as much as you might want to.

“Once we’ve got the dominance in the scrum it spreads out to our whole game and we all enjoy that. The second we go back in the scrum we tend to go into our shell and you don’t want to be out there playing. That’s what we’ll try to to — get on top of their scrum and enjoy it.”